Thursday, 31 August 2017

"He wanted to test his interpretation against hers. Since she had no
such thing, she was dumbfounded that sound and image could be connected
with abstract language in one's mind. His words poured into her head
like sawdust." (Kyoko Yoshida)

"Homer, you spoke about a one-substance world, a world in which mortals
and deathless gods coexist, a rich Hellenic past, font of Western
rationality. However, you argue, it is when that one-substance world is
abolished, when the panoply of gods are sent packing for a
one-god/two-substance split between the secular and spiritual, that a
truly rational world is set in place." (Karen Yamashita)

"One question can occupy a lifetime. What is poverty, Homer? However
defined, you point out, it depends on notions of the social, moral
judgment, and responsibility. What rights do people have to labor and to
the fruits of the earth? If poverty is undesirable, what is our duty?"
(Karen Yamashita)

"History, gently you remind me and urge me back. I have told myself,
since I am prone to write fiction, that history and knowledge what
really happened is necessary because someone has to be accountable. Yet
how close can anyone get to history even if you live it?" (Karen
Yamashita)

"In an interview with Dosse, Fromanger recalls how Deleuze asked him how
he managed to paint on a blank canvas. Fromager's response, that the
canvas was not actually black but black 'with everything every painter
has painted before me,' clearly excited Deleuze, who is said to have
exclaimed: 'So it's not about blackening the canvas but about whitening
it.'" (Frida Beckman)

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

"I realize that for my family the automatic and habitual of their prewar
childhoods had been entirely overturned. A terrible way to be freed to
new knowledge and to change. But this is fiction." (Karen Tei Yamashita,
Letters to Memory)

"German words from recent times trying to translate Latin words from a bygone age that were trying to translate Greek words from antiquity. But what were the Greek words trying to translate?" (David Farrell Krell)

"Literature destroys this border between perceiver and perceived. We are
no longer placed in a position of ordering judgement but BECOME OTHER
through a confrontation with the forces that compose us." (Claire
Colebrook)

"This, it seems to me, is like saying that because most restaurants are
very bad, one should play the percentage game, forget about trying to
find the good ones, and eat at McDonald's every meal." (Nick Hornby)

"In a time of nihilism, writes Lyotard, Deleuze was the affirmation.
'Why do I speak of him in the past sense,' Lyotard asks himself, and
imagines Deleuze's reply: 'It's your idiotic grief.'" (Frida Beckman,
Gilles Deleuze)

Monday, 14 August 2017

"Before leaving, the seven-year-old adventurer sat down to write this
short, semi-literate message--Deere Mom Ime in the lake Lov Andy--then
tiptoed out of the bungalow, jumped into the water, and drowned. Ime
in the lake." (Paul Auster, Invisible)

Friday, 11 August 2017

"Look at the parallels, Born said, and it's not as far-fetched as you'd
think: extermination of the Indians is turned into the extermination of
the Jews; westward expansion to exploit natural resources is turned into
eastward expansion for the same purpose; enslavement of the blacks for
low-cost labor is turned into subjugation of the Slavs to produce a
similar result. Long live America, Adam, he said, pouring another shot
of cognac into both our glasses." (Paul Auster, Invisible)

"The escalators in the Tottenham Court Road tube station are long ones;
and civilized etiquette in England is that people stand on one side
only, leaving a clear passage for those in a hurry (unlike the U.S.,
where people clog the entire width of the steps)." (Denise Levertov)

"My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other
phenomena of life or thought. All encounters are configurate, not
isolate. In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part
of life as trees, stars or dung." (Henry Miller)

"It would be wrong to seek a direct transposition of musical chords in
the way they are developed in the Baroque; and yet it would also be
erroneous to conclude with Leibniz's indifference in respect to the
musical model: the question, rather involves analogy. And we know that
Leibniz was always trying to bring it to a new rigor." (Deleuze)

"The Baroque is inseparable from a new regime of light and color. To
begin, we can consider light and shadows as 1 and 0, as the two levels
of the world separated by a thin line of waters : the Happy and the
Damned." (Deleuze)

"The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative
function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent
things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman,
Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds... Yet the Baroque trait twists and
turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the
other." (Deleuze)

Sunday, 6 August 2017

Our international workshop ImaginAsia 2017, hosted by us at Meiji, started yesterday. Students from Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, UK, and Japan work in small groups to look into the local histories of Asian immigrants in Japan. This is the statement I wrote as an introduction.

About
ImaginAsia

How many Asias are there in this world?
How many do we know and how many do we live? Beyond any narrow-minded ethnocentrism
and baseless identification with the Western gaze, we are now embarking, once
again, on our collective journey of self-knowledge. There may be a thousand
Asias that run through us, here and now, releasing and recapturing us at each
moment, making us a collective flux of diversity, differentiation, and constant
discovery. Imagination is the only nation we share and across cultural and
linguistic borders we keep encountering our new selves, thanks to your new
friends walking side-by-side with you in this unknown territory. That is the
spirit of ImaginAsia.

This year’s edition of ImaginAsia will
explore the rich presence of various Asian traditions in Tokyo. How can we see
through the surface and speak to this vibrant inter-Asian mega-city with a
necessary socio-historical and critical consciousness? This is a truly unique
educational and research opportunity for all participants. Let’s see what comes
out of it.

Saturday, 5 August 2017

"Why can't we get along without bodies? What leads us to go beyond the
phenomenon or the perceived? Leibniz often says that if bodies did not
exist outside of perception, the only perceiving substances would be
either human or angelic, to the detriment of the variety and of the
animality of the universe." (Deleuze)

Thursday, 3 August 2017

"A bifurcation, like the exit from the temple, is called a point in the
neighborhood of series' divergence. Borges, one of Leibniz's disciples,
invoked the Chinese philosopher-architect Ts'ui Pên, the inventor of
the 'garden with bifurcating paths,' a baroque labyrinth whose infinite
series converge or diverge, forming a webbing of time embracing all
possibilities." (Deleuze)

Tuesday, 1 August 2017

"A complaining guitar sound---one high, stretched, strident note that
gave off the feel of someone trying to scrape dirt off his hand with a
knife---rang through "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," growing more and less and
more and less accepting as the drama took shape,
nothing-you-can-do-about-it turning into I-can't-take-it-anymore and
turning back." (Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come)

"I am the prior of Clusa, and I know well how to make discourse, and how
to write. In Aquitaine there is no learning, they are rustics all: and
if any one in Aquitaine has learnt any grammar, he straightway thinks
himself Virgil. In France is learning, but not much. But in Lombardy,
where I mostly studied, is the fountain of learning." (Benedict of
Clusa, quoted by Helen Waddell in her The Wandering Scholars)